Oral History of Al (Allan) Alcorn - Computer History Museum

58 Pages·2012·0.25 MB·English

Oral History of Allan (Al) Alcorn

Interviewed by:
Henry Lowood

Recorded:
April 26, 2008 and May 23, 2008
Mountain View, California

CHM Reference number: X4596.2008

© 2008 Computer History Museum
Oral History of Al Alcorn

Henry Lowood: Ok Al, thanks so very much for agreeing to do this oral history. I wanted to start right at
the beginning and ask you to give a little background about your family, where you were born and where
you grew up.
Allan (Al) Alcorn: Yeah, I was born and raised in San Francisco in 1948, just after World War II, baby
boom, and lived in various places. We were kind of a lower-middle class family, moved around in San
Francisco, various apartments, and I guess the most interesting thing is eventually we wound up at an
apartment flat in 520 Ashbury, just a half a block from the corner of Haight-Ashbury. When I was very
young I always had an interest in technical sort of things, and I wound up talking my dad [into something]
-- My mother and father got divorced when I was pretty young. My father, a Merchant Marine said “Ok,”
and signed me up for a correspondence course under RCA on radio TV repair, electronics, and so I was
in junior high school when I took this course, and it was basically a technician’s kind of course; how to
solder. It wasn’t a whole lot of theory; it was just the practical stuff. So my father wasn’t around, but
across the street was a very nice man named Emmett Marrujo and he ran, and owned and operated a
television shop [S&M TV Repair] down on Haight Street, down towards Divisadero, and so in junior high
school I’d go down there and hang out. Remember I was in junior high, and I got to the point where I
could fix things, and I actually had a tube caddy. This thing would be hard for me to carry, you know.
You’ve got to remember, I couldn’t drive a car because I was too young; I was like 14, 15. I remember
that didn’t deter me. I still wound up driving cars anyway, and the repair man, I mean, did this for years
and I got to be very good at it, and in that business in those days it was all vacuum tubes, and when the
TV, the outside guy, he’d go from the shop to the person’s house, and if he couldn’t fix the TV by
replacing the tube, which most of the time you could, he’d take the chassis out of the whole TV and bring
it to the shop. The inside guy, he had to be able to fix anything; he was like a journeyman position, you
know, and I got to the point where I could do that. The other thing about this shop that was interesting is
by after lunch, most of these guys got pretty drunk, and so I’d be the only sober one there, and they’d
have a crap game which started about 3:00 in the back room. So I basically got to run the shop for a
while so it was pretty fun. And it was really a great [experience]-- He was kind of a surrogate father to
me, and it worked out well because when I went to Lowell High School in San Francisco. Great High
School, I believe Bill Hewlett went to that school; a college prep kind of high school, and <inaudible>
physics. Thank God I had a good education there and I was on the football team.
I was actually quite a jock. I wound up playing all-city football with OJ Simpson. I was all-state, and I had
offers for a few colleges, and eventually I was not offered a scholarship at Cal, but I got into Cal based on
that, and leveraged that to get in and quit the football team after a week. I decided to be an engineer or a
football player. I thought my career would be better off as an engineer. So, but where it really paid off
was about the first year my father paid for the tuition. It wasn’t that much at Cal in those days, but then
he got a heart attack and he couldn’t pay anymore. Now here I was-- and this is of course in the middle
of the ‘60s, that reading, writing, revolution time-- and I really wanted to stay there for two reasons: One, I
liked the place, and secondly it was the Vietnam War, so if you didn’t do that you, you, you know-- Some
of my friends, you know, died in Vietnam, so you don’t want to do that. So, I stayed there and I went to
the college job search thing and there was an opening for a TV repair man three blocks off of campus on
Telegraph Avenue at Hubbard Radio and Television Repair. It turns out Mr. Hubbard who owned the
place, his son was a professor in one of my classes in electrical engineering. So, he really trusted me
and it was a great deal. I worked my way through college, but I’m not pleading hardship because I
actually had a key to the place, I could come any time I want, I got piece work, and I was able to
comfortably pay my way through college fixing TVs, and I got <inaudible> journeyman thing. It also was a
great base when the People’s Park riots happened. It was right in no man’s land, so I got to see both
sides of the tear gas and everything.
CHM Ref: X4596.2008 © 2008 Computer History Museum Page 2 of 58
Oral History of Al Alcorn

Lowood: So there was never any doubt really that you would go into engineering given…
Alcorn: Right, and I remember I really, really liked electronics. I remember buying the first transistor
[BC?] 107, you know, and playing with it and that stuff, but like most people, you know, I said well, I guess
I should be an electrical engineer. There was also another very interesting-- Ah, the other telling thing
was when I was in junior high school there was a program at Polytechnic High School which is nearby our
home in Haight-Ashbury. My brother went there. Very, very tough bottom-end school, and they had a
thing called Lux Lab that was just-- in a separate building, just next to the main building, and it was about
electronics, and I wanted to be in that class because I was a bright, young kid in junior high school, and
they had--it was oversubscribed, I showed up, but I couldn’t get in, and it was just by luck of the draw,
toss of the coin. I was very depressed. That’s when my father got me the RCA correspondence course.
So, I was the youngest guy to ever complete the correspondence course.
Lowood: So immediately at Berkeley you went into electrical engineering as soon as you could?
Alcorn: Not off the bat. It was electrical engineering computer science. I had decided that I liked analog
electronics, this whole new field of digital electronics, and computer science didn’t really interest me. It
just seemed like, you know, kind of a different problem. The elegance and the artistry in an analog circuit
appealed to me; amplifiers, oscillators, you know, linear stuff, non-linear stuff, those kinds of equations. I
really enjoyed that, but thank God at Cal in those days they force-fed you enough. They made me take a
course EE101 which was Computer Programming, so then it was Fortran on a 7090, 7094, punch cards
and all that; later a 6400 Control Data. I probably would not have taken it had it not been that they forced
me to, and thank God I got that exposure, and also digital circuits and stuff like that. So, I got a broader
education than I wanted, but it’s what I needed, you know.
Lowood: I’ve read you say that you like to solve analog problems using digital and so on. Did this mix
that you had in your education kind of set you up to think about using different kinds of digital technology
as they came online through the early 1970s and maybe applying them to the areas that previously had
been areas of analog electronics?
Alcorn: The real moment it did that was when I got to my junior year at the factory a.k.a. Cal Berkeley;
not a warm and fuzzy place, right? And the pressure of the war and the protesting going on, all this
conflict, I got to the point where many students do. I almost dropped out. I just didn’t like the whole thing;
too much pressure. So I decided ah, the work-study program. There was a work-study program that was
pretty well unknown at Cal at the time; there were 50 <audio gap>. Ok so I decided to participate in the
work-study program, and that was a program where you would work in industry for paid for six months
and then go back to school for six months. Cal was on the quarter system at the time. And I thought, oh
great, I’ll make a lot of money and I’ll save up all this money that will help pay for everything, and I had a
heck of a time getting a job. I put my resume out. I couldn’t get anything- no response, not a response,
and my mother worked as a secretary for an executive in an insurance company and this guy knew Mr.
Roberts who was the President at Ampex and said “I’ll get you a job.” So I finally gave up and said “Ok
Mom,” and boom, I get into the interview process and I’m hired by Kurt Wallace at the Video File Group.
That exposure to high resolution video technology and well-done engineering, really, really top flight
crafted skill, excellent work was really a great exposure and really, you know, I now had to do things I
now saw what an engineer did, which usually doesn’t happen until after you’ve graduated, and I imagine
some people do this and discover they don’t really like the field they’ve studied for because it’s not the
same as going to school. It’s not the same s fixing TVs. And I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the people.
CHM Ref: X4596.2008 © 2008 Computer History Museum Page 3 of 58
Oral History of Al Alcorn

That’s where I met Nolan Bushnell, Ted Dabney, Steve Mayer, Larry Emmons, those kinds of guys while
there. And so when I went back to school, boy I now was focused because then I said “Gee, I want to
answer these questions: How do I build a certain band pass amplifier? How do I solve this problem?
How do I do these things?” And these questions were there for me so I was a much better student for the
things that I knew applied.
Lowood: So something like spring, summer you were at Ampex and say fall, winter you would be back in
classes. Not coterminous in any way, but you spent the full six months really working.
Alcorn: Absolutely. Lived down in Silicon Valley and did that, yeah.
Lowood: Ampex was a very hot company in the ‘50s and into the ‘60s; very underappreciated today of
course because people have seen a lot of other companies come and go in Silicon Valley. Could you talk
a little bit about what it was like at Ampex and what the feeling was there when you arrived?
Alcorn: Yeah, exactly. It was one of the pioneer companies in the valley. I mean there was Lockheed of
course, and there was Fairchild. I don’t believe National had even started then, so it was really the
pioneer company that started out with an audio tape recording, and then pioneered video tape recording,
and I worked in a spin-off. We were very lucky. It wasn’t really a spin-off, it was a division called Video
File which was a group that was headed by Charlie Steinberg, who later became the President of Ampex
and Mike Felix, one of the smartest guys I ever knew and John Watney was there; very good technical
people and a few of the people that were involved with the video tape stuff, so they really knew this stuff
really well. The product they had was a big system. The idea was to use video tape, this two-inch wide
video tape in a different format all together to store documents, to actually store, retrieve readable
documents. So, it required a very high-resolution camera. It wasn’t television standards, it was 15
frames a second, over 1000 scan lines; custom stuff, which was good because now you’re unstuck from
“Oh, this is what television is,” you know, 525 line 15 kilohertz horizontal. This is all different, and so I did
a lot of analog stuff. But then there was one of the things they had to do, one of the experiments they had
me do was make--because people were complaining about getting epileptic seizures watching these
displays at 15 hertz, even though they were long persistence phosphors. They wanted to see, maybe
they could do a two-to-one interlace, or a four-to-one interlace, and so I had to build a sync generator that
would do all these weird standards, and the way you built sync generators in those days was like a divide
by five, divide by seven. They were very difficult, tedious things to build. I mean, a sync generator that
Ampex had for the building was like a rack of electronics. So, and I having known TTL from my days at
Cal, I built a sync generator with digital dividers that was easily modifiable, so with a few switches I could
do all these things and make changes-- just to save me work because I’m lazy. I could just do all these
different experiments and see how it would work. So that’s where I started applying this stuff. And the
other very similar thing for me-- What happened was that the plan was to do the six months back at
Berkeley and then go back to Ampex for six months and then do enough to graduate and I’d get a job, but
at Ampex-- and I’d retire with a gold watch and be happy.
By the time I’d finished-- I came back, Ampex had a problem. Now they were in trouble. They had this
fundamental problem because they were doing audio tape recording, and reel-to-reel audio tape, and
they were selling the stuff at retail and they were in the return business, and they had all of a sudden the
first loss they ever posted, and now they couldn’t hire me back. But my old boss, Kurt Wallace, who’s still
a friend wanted to put me on ice basically and had a company run by Johnston, an Englishman. I think
he did Alto Computer, I’m not sure. But anyway, this was a company called Peripheral Technologies. He
CHM Ref: X4596.2008 © 2008 Computer History Museum Page 4 of 58
Oral History of Al Alcorn

got me a job there. It’s funny, he said, “Oh, they’ll be out of business in six months or so and I’ll get you
back, so just go there.” I was basically a junior tech at that company, and they built computer output
microphone machines. So this is back in the days when there were legions of people typing data into this
computer system to do billing and stuff like that, and the idea was to keep the records on a microfiche as
opposed to microfilm, so they had a funny camera, but they had a lot of electronics, all TTL that would
take the data, and spool it from I guess mag tape they used, and spool it to microfilm. So they had a
good engineer, a good analog engineer and a really good digital engineer, hardware engineer, and they
shared two ends of a big table, and they worked very well together, and I really apprenticed. I wish I
could remember the digital engineer’s name. He was excellent, and showed me some of the
conventional tricks and the tricks of the trade, how to do some of the stuff which <inaudible>.
Lowood: So this was probably 1970 maybe?
Alcorn: Yeah, this was probably-- Yeah, because I was first at Ampex in ’68 so this was 1969, ’70.
Lowood: You did get back to Ampex.
Alcorn: What happened was, the company got bought by Pertech, a Southern California company.
Surprise, instead of going out of business they got bought, and okay, and so it’s in Orange County and I
wasn’t on the list, being a junior engineer, of the guys that had moved down there, but was on the edge of
the list. So they actually flew me down to interview, which was like, “Oh wow, this is cool,” and I
interviewed them and basically they hired me and paid to move me down, and rented an apartment in
Laguna Beach. It was wonderful, and so at that place I learned more about digital-- pretty much doing
nothing but digital electronics and the occasional power supply fix, so it was very interesting because it
was a lot different than Berkeley. And just as an aside I had-- I was somewhat of an activist at Cal in that
era and I was very involved with People’s Park and in fact in the book People’s Park you’ll see three of
my photographs. I’m an amateur photographer, and so they were pretty good photographs in this book. I
had some of my photographs printed up as 11 x14s [that] were on exhibit. So I had these prints, and I put
them up on my cubicle of the confrontation between the Blue Meanies and the students and it was pretty
like, really-- they were good photojournalism. I remember one of the vice presidents of Orange County
coming in huffing and puffing, looking and saying “Why don’t you have pictures of kids throwing tear gas
at the cops?” I go, “Hey, where do you buy tear gas? They wouldn’t sell me tear gas.” And I go, “Where
did you find this out?” I read it in the Orange County Daily Register. But I got away with it, and it was
funny, that’s how I grew a beard because if you grew a beard you’d get fired. So, I wanted to see.
Lowood: And what happened?
Alcorn: I didn’t get fired. And then about that time I wound up-- Ampex recovered a bit and Kurt said,
“Hey, do you want your job back?” I said “Yes,” and I moved back up to Redwood City and now I was
full-time junior engineer at Ampex at $1,000 a month.
Lowood: I’m not sure if the timing works out, but did you know Lee Felsenstein at Berkeley at all?
Alcorn: Never knew him there at the time, no. We were around obviously, but we were throwing
different rocks I guess.
CHM Ref: X4596.2008 © 2008 Computer History Museum Page 5 of 58
Oral History of Al Alcorn

Lowood: So now you’ve got back to Ampex. Did you go into the same group that you had been in
before?
Alcorn: Yes, I went to the very same group as before minus Nolan who had spun off to do this crazy,
stupid thing called Computer Space, this video game. I mean, what an idea, you know. And Nolan was
always a puzzlement because he wasn’t the greatest engineer, but he was-- he had actually formed a
stock buying club, where you get enough guys together that can pool enough money where they actually
get an account to buy stock. It wasn’t as common for people to buy stock in those days, and so he was
more of an entrepreneur than an engineer, but he was okay, and he was obviously very, very bright. He
reported to Ted Dabney, so when Nolan left Ted was still there so I took Nolan’s old place--office--but I
worked for Ed De Benedetti on the camera.
Lowood: So the chronology then was that Nolan was there when you were there on the internship, and
then when you left and came back, by that time he had already left.
Alcorn: That’s right, and we have talked to “Hey, Nolan’s quit. Wow, he quit?” I mean, this is not
something you did back in those days. It was a very crazy maneuver, and he was from Salt Lake City
and the whole thing.
Lowood: So were all of you guys in the Video File part of Ampex as well? Were Nolan and Ted Dabney,
all the people, in the same group?
Alcorn: Yeah. In fact, Patty Ewart was the Plant Nurse back when they had plant nurses and we hired
her as a secretary. She was my secretary for many years.
Lowood: There were a number of people who eventually ended up at Atari who came from Ampex.
Today we might say in a way it was sort of a spin-off. This kind of thing is very common of course in the
Silicon Valley.
Alcorn: Now.
Lowood: Now, but at the time what was it like?
Alcorn: Well, there were others. I mean, <inaudible> Division spun out. There were people-- and there
was another group from Trans American Insurance, Trans something [Trans-American Video, Inc.], that
stole the concept of Video File. Now, you know-- I mean, if you’re going to steal something, then steal
something that’s going to make money. So they were sniping at people, and so there were people
spinning out. That was going on, but it wasn’t as prevalent as it is today, and indeed frankly what
happened, the reason I got hired was I was recruited by a recruiter to go to work at this competition for
Ampex, and they flew me up from Orange County to interview and they were like a mile down the street
from the Video File Group which was in Sunnyvale, not Redwood City. And they kind of dropped the ball.
Once I finished the interview, they said goodbye. I’m sitting here, you know, <inaudible> take a bus to the
airport. I mean like I didn’t have a car, I was-- but I just walked over to Video File and showed up and
said “Hey guys.” These guys say “Hi, I was going to work for them,”-- I gave them all the information that
I’d learned and they said “Hey, we’ll buy you lunch,” and then shortly after they said “We’ll hire you.”
CHM Ref: X4596.2008 © 2008 Computer History Museum Page 6 of 58
Oral History of Al Alcorn

Lowood: Just to close up the Video File thing, what was the intended market for that?
Alcorn: Ah, yeah, there were like a few big customers. It was like the intended market for the
computers, you know. They sold one to Southern Pacific to keep track of way bills, they sold one to the--
they tried to sell one to the Department of Motor Vehicles to keep track of all the little slips of paper, these
funny sized pieces of paper, and the most endearing one to me at the time, was one for the government
which was-- and these-- they would stage these big computer systems in the back room on a computer
floor, you know. They were huge. I mean-- and it was first-- the sign went up NSA, because they had
signs over it and they came by to do the-- the generals came by and they go “We can’t say that,” so it was
Fort Meade. Okay, the sign went up “Fort Meade”. What’s this? And then you can’t do that, we’re telling
them too much, so then it was the Department of Defense, you know. It kept changing. So, now we
called it Fort Dodd. That was the project, and one of our guys-- this is back when the NSA was still a big
secret, so we didn’t know what they were using it for. I didn’t really care, but apparently had problems
with the <inaudible>. We actually take the video picture, the video rates, and then to print them out they’d
put it on a hard disk, because Ampex really invented the hard disk recording for video. It came from
those guys, all that technology, floating heads and all that. And they physically slowed the disk down like
ten to one speed and then ran it through some kind of a funny thermal printer with a funny line CRT and
the wet-back paper and made prints that way, you know. If the disk wouldn’t work they had a crash and
so we sent a buy back there, one of the techs, one of the engineers back there who could make the disk
work but when they got there they wouldn’t let him see the disk because he might have something in his
eyes he could read the data off the disk, and they finally said, “Well what if we grind it up in little bitsy
pieces, can you fix it then?” He said “No,” and he said “Can you grind a disk like that?” “Yeah, oh yea. I
got trippers and” so and we went away and he said “Every time I went to the bathroom a guy would be
sitting there holding a .45 looking at you while you’re going.” So it was all these funny stories, so that was
the market. They sold maybe five or six systems, you know, big systems and, you know, it was not really
a great product, but boy with the great technology that was there and the engineering process of how to
get boards built, I think that’s very important.
Lowood: So, Bushnell’s left now when you get back. You’re working at Ampex. As we know Bushnell
then went on to do Computer Space and had this connection with Nutting [Associates] and eventually he
founded Syzygy +in the middle of 1972. In that chronology when did he actually come to you? What
were the circumstances of him coming to you?
Alcorn: What happened was I think the technical details-- and you should check this with Nolan-- my
understanding was he gave Nutting Associates a license to build Computer Space and that’s why it says
“Syzygy engineered” on it through Syzygy Company. Then he and Ted Dabney came on as VP of
Engineering as contractors or consultants as opposed to full-time. And then as I think as Nolan said the
game didn’t sell that well-- and Nolan found the guy [Dave Ralston, marketing director of Nutting
Associates] because my understanding was they shared the same dentist. Mr. Nutting was like this
coinkydink. It’s the only person who manufactured coin-op stuff west of the Mississippi, so that was
convenient. His previous machine was Computer Quiz, so hence the Computer Space name, you know,
and then apparently they had a US sales guy that did all the sales, they had a foreign sales guy that sold
one machine to Canada, and Mr. Nutting made him the president of the company, you know, and didn’t
like the US sales guy because the US sales guy made more money on commissions than he did, so you
fire him. Nolan’s saying “This is not how I run a company,” but Nutting-- and so Nolan said to him, my
understanding was that he says, “Look, you give me some equity in this company, make me a partner,
and <inaudible> make this a very big company,” and he said “No.” Nutting told him “You’re’ just a kid,
you don’t understand business <inaudible>,” and I won’t do it. So, ok. So Nolan said “Great, we’ll spin
CHM Ref: X4596.2008 © 2008 Computer History Museum Page 7 of 58
Oral History of Al Alcorn

out,” so now he’s decides to leave because Computer Space had kind of run its course and he wasn’t
going to-- he wanted to start his own company, this bold maneuver like “Whoa, how are you going to do
this?” So they had royalty money income coming from this thing and they used it to buy slot machines
and they had their own route. Nolan loved operating, so we actually had a route in the area of maybe 50
machines, and that’s when Nolan came to me and said “Hey, I need to hire-- I want to hire you because I
want to start this company and I think it would be really great.” I suspect he hired me because I was
cheap. I was making $1200 a month by that time at Ampex, and he offered me $1000 a month, so it was
a cut-in salary, but things started degenerating at Ampex and it was really getting a little less fun than it
was. There was a lot of economic pressure. They merged another group, the-- I forgot the name of it
that did training, audio training for schools and stuff, and they didn’t have-- there was an engineer there
that-- I won’t say his name, but he wasn’t very good. So it was very frustrating to have to work with the
guy. In fact, I, being subversive, this guy was working on a video head read amp, and he was just
incompetent and every time you have to DC couple these amps, even though you’re doing it up a very
high frequency you have to DC couple them because they read and then they write, and when you write
there’s this huge pulse, so it charges up all the capacitors in the AC coupling and it takes forever for
everything to settle. If you DC couple it, it doesn’t happen. And furthermore, there’s a part called the 733
[mu-733] which is a differential, it’s a chip. <inaudible> was meant for this purpose <inaudible> used
commonly, completely unaware. So, this guy would, he’d solve one problem and another problem would
crop up and he’d solve that problem and go back. He was going in a big circle and it got to be where it
was just like, the good engineers were going “This idiot.” So one day, one afternoon I made up the right
circuit, the correct circuit and put it in his machine where he didn’t know it, actually put it in, and it worked
perfectly. So, yes, yes, yes, I solved the problem. Then everybody laughed and said “By the way that’s
not your circuit. That’s what I’ve been telling you to do for the last three months,” and it was fun for me.
Lowood: Did you know Nolan well enough from the internship that he just called you up and said “Hey
Al, I’m starting a new thing.”
Alcorn: Yeah, we weren’t tight but we knew of each other, yeah. We didn’t share an office, but yeah.
And he shows up; takes me to lunch in a company car. It was his blue station wagon, Chevy or
Oldsmobile Station Wagon and the concept-- I’ve got to tell you, the concept of a free car, like wow, what
an idea, you know, and he’d rented this space on Scott Boulevard, and it seemed like such a-- I mean
come on, this was the era. I mean this was I think a real key thing that’s hard to communicate to people
today. You had the Vietnam War going on, you had this feeling that, you know, there was a Cold War,
and remember we were building fallout shelters and there was this sense that we could be dead at any
minute from nuclear annihilation, and you had people coming back from Vietnam in a box, dead, and our
parents all survived the depression and thought that my God you got a college education, you are set.
You know, don’t screw with it, but we learned not to trust the government anymore, and we were young
and adventurous and crazy risk taking. I mean, I was from Berkeley. Anyone who was from Utah
certainly wasn’t radical at the time, but there was this feeling of let’s do something because, you know, life
is short, and so there was this kind of a-- and my thought about the process was that “Oh yeah, he gave
me a little cut in salary, he gave me 10% of the stock in the company,” which had no bearing to me at all”
because I didn’t know what that was going to be worth, and I thought the company would fail. I knew that
most startups didn’t succeed, but I knew it would be fun working with them, and the idea of working in a
very small company <inaudible> do everything, whereas at Ampex, you know, there was manufacturing,
you didn’t mess with them, and there was all this process which is good to know about, but you’ve got to
just focus on drawing the schematics and testing things. So I had a big expanded range and then when it
failed I would go back to Ampex. And I saw people that did that and came back on a much higher spot
because now-- so it’s actually a way to advance. So that was my fallback. We never really thought that
this idea would be a big success.
CHM Ref: X4596.2008 © 2008 Computer History Museum Page 8 of 58
Oral History of Al Alcorn

Lowood: So that moment Atari-- It was called Atari by then, right?
Alcorn: No Syzygy. My business card.
Lowood: That’s right. So at that moment it was basically Nolan, Al Alcorn and Ted Dabney.
Alcorn: Nolan, Ted Dabney, then me.
Lowood: Sure, but that was basically the company at that point. The other founder was Larry Bryan?
Alcorn: Ah, yeah. Well I’m glad you brought that up. Larry was actually a part of the original forming of
Syzygy, whatever that was, but by the time Nolan hired me … See, the original idea of the whole thing of
Nolan originally was to use a Supernova Mini Computer running a bank of video games so you could
share it among a bunch of video games in an arcade to make an economic model. In fact my
understanding-- you could ask him-- his wife was the secretary or the accountant of the corporation, and
he had to check out to buy a few of these computers and they were like $10,000 a piece, and she never
sent the order. She thought it was so crazy, and by the time Nolan would have noticed if the chips or the
computer wasn’t there, he had designed out the need for the computer, because the computers were so
slow at that time, you know. So there was this brilliant leap that Nolan made about how he could get rid
of just a little bit of logic and could do the same thing the computer’s going to do just much, much faster,
so he didn’t need the computers. Bryan was going to be the guy to program the computers. He was the
programmer from Ampex that programmed these because we had our-- they’re running this whole huge
system. The video file was a little SLI or an ancient computer, not well known and it was, you know, a
mini, and he knew how to program assembly language which was the thing in those days. But we didn’t
need them because there was no programming.
Lowood: So the equipment that was set up in Nolan’s daughter’s bedroom and all of that, he never
actually set up a computer to run that.
Alcorn: Not to my knowledge. He never had a computer.
Lowood: Oh, interesting. And so Larry Bryan then was kind of superfluous at that point.
Alcorn: He was never in the office to my knowledge, never actually-- That somehow terminated before
we actually opened the doors on Scott Boulevard.
Lowood: Okay, so it was the three of you. Is it true your title was Senior Engineer or something like
that?
Alcorn: Yeah, something like that. It was never VP of Engineering. It was eventually VP of R&D or
something like that.
Lowood: Was the idea that you were pretty much in charge of the R&D or the development part of it
maybe more? What did you go into the company thinking your role would be?
CHM Ref: X4596.2008 © 2008 Computer History Museum Page 9 of 58
Oral History of Al Alcorn

Alcorn: I think-- Remember, both Nolan and Ted were Electrical Engineers, and I’m this junior guy, you
know? I’m the low man on the totem pole, and I think the main feature is that I was cheap, right? And I’d
go along with the gag, and I’m sure he would have loved to have hired the professionals back there, the
real greats, but he couldn’t afford them. Why would they leave, you know? So I was what he got, which I
think was the best because I wasn’t burdened with knowledge of how you do video. I knew how to do
video from the old days, so what was your question again on that?
Lowood: What did you see your role as being?
Alcorn: So Nolan gave me this job to do Pong, a simple video game which we now know was just an
exercise. So he left me alone to go do this. I mean, I suspect if it was the real game he would have been
over my shoulder all the time, but because it was just this test, which I thought was the real thing, I
basically had free reign to go do this, and I’d ask the question occasionally to Ted or Nolan about how to
do this or that, and that’s what happened. I wound up making [it], because I was lied to about it-- I
thought it was a real game, so I put features in it to make it more playable, which if you think about it is an
exercise. Why bother if nobody’s going to play it? It’s like the movie The Producers, you know? We’re
going to steal this idea from Magnavox, but it’s a turkey so what’s the problem? All of a sudden it’s a
success.
Lowood: So day one basically that was the assignment?
Alcorn: Absolutely, from day one Nolan-- “We got this contract from General Electric. We’re going to do
a home consumer video game, very, very simple, one spot,” and I’m sure he got it from seeing the
Magnavox. I think I must have seen an ad on television for the Magnavox.
Lowood: Of course there was that demo in Burlingame.
Alcorn: I was never there. Nolan was. Apparently Nolan went to see it, and I’m sure it gave him the
idea for it, “Hey this is really, really simple,” but we knew it wasn’t a successful game. People didn’t like
playing it. It didn’t sell very well. So, you know, let’s just do the most simple game to save time, you
know, and he had-- and Nolan had-- this is important-- a contract from Bally. He had gone and talked to
Bally and he had a contract for a video game-- because <inaudible> there was Computer Space. That
was the video game. So he was going to do one for Bally, and he had a pinball machine he was going to
make. In fact, this is back …
Lowood: The pinball machine is not the Bally contract?
Alcorn: Yeah. Bally had three things we had to do for them: a pinball machine, a video game and I think
some kind of a major arcade piece.
Lowood: There was a something I read, maybe you can correct this, that it was a racing game or
something like that.
Alcorn: A video game?
CHM Ref: X4596.2008 © 2008 Computer History Museum Page 10 of 58